


Critical Error

by dracusfyre



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Gen, Grief/Mourning, I Made Myself Cry, JARVIS dies, Jarvis (Iron Man movies) Feels, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-09-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:34:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26184265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dracusfyre/pseuds/dracusfyre
Summary: Tony grieves for JARVIS after Ultron murders him, and Rhodey doesn't let him grieve alone.
Relationships: James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark, Jarvis (Iron Man movies) & Tony Stark
Comments: 4
Kudos: 42
Collections: Tony Stark Flash Bingo





	Critical Error

**Author's Note:**

> Title: Critical Error  
> Card Number: 023  
> Square: 2 “Friday”  
> Ship: None  
> Rating: G  
> Warnings: Major Character Death (JARVIS), Grief/Mourning  
> Summary: Tony grieves for JARVIS after Ultron murders him. Rhodey doesn't let him grieve alone.
> 
> A/N: I wrote this at the same time that I heard that Chadwick Boseman had passed. I haven't reread it since and I don't know how long it's going to take for me to be ABLE to reread it because of the sad associations I have with it, so I apologize for any mistakes.

Tony raked his fingers through his hair and propped his elbows up on his desk, staring down at his keyboard. The lab was silent but for the whirring of the few machines that hadn’t been damaged in the Ultron attack, but the sound of the fans echoed oddly in the room, acoustics made alien by shattered windows and displaced desks. Overhead, lights flickered, adding their barely heard buzz to the drone of the computers. His eyes felt raw and swollen, sinuses clogged and chest tight; he had a glass of whiskey at his elbow but it was hard to swallow around the grief that had its hands around his throat. Behind him, casting a golden glow that glinted in the whiskey and reflected off of the broken glass on the floor, the holographic rendering of JARVIS’s destroyed code still rotated gently in the air. He couldn’t bring himself to turn it off even though it felt like he was in the room with a dead body; grotesquely, he could see parts of the rendition where the learning algorithm that made up the core of JARVIS was trying to fix itself even though the code was too corrupted, building itself up only to fall apart over and over again. Tony had called JARVIS a casualty, which he was, but he wasn’t dead so much as brain dead, living on life support so long as his servers were running.

Which meant, he had realized almost from the beginning, that Tony was going to have to be the one to kill him. JARVIS wasn’t a program, but a self-aware, learning operating system for not just the compound and all of the Avengers’ IT infrastructure, but also Tony’s suits, his cars, his home; Tony was going to have to turn him off, uninstall him, and purge him from the system or none of those things could operate. Tony had to pull the plug and cremate him both. So while the others prepared for the coming battle, Tony held a vigil here in the artificial gloaming of the lab.

Bruce had been the last to leave, but of course he’d been the only other one to know what they were looking at when Tony had activated it in the first place. Steve had seen a lost asset, and his voice had held regret but not grief. Thor hadn’t cared at all, which Tony would chalk up to ignorance rather than callousness one day, when the feeling of Thor’s grip on his neck faded. Natasha had seen Tony’s grief but not understood why. No one understood that Tony had lost a friend, part of his _family_ , except-

As if his thoughts had summoned him, Tony felt a hand fall on his shoulder, the weight of it warm and familiar. “I’m so sorry, Tony,” Rhodey said, and the roughness of his voice, the sympathy there, ripped a sob from Tony’s chest before he could choke it back. There was a scrape as Rhodey pulled up a chair, leaning against him to offer the simple comfort of his presence.

He wanted to say _it hurts,_ and _I miss him,_ but he couldn’t force the words out pass the knot in his throat. The space where JARVIS had lived, not in circuits and server racks but in Tony’s ear, at his back and the tips of his fingers, ached like a missing limb. But Rhodey probably knew that already; he’d been there when Tony had first started developing the AI and had supported him when Tony had tentatively suggested naming it after Edwin. JARVIS had been their third through many sessions in many labs over the years, friend and confidant and assistant all in one. If Tony was JARVIS’s father, Rhodey was his uncle, and Tony was glad beyond words that he was here. Tony pressed his eyes closed tightly, but wetness seeped around them to trail silently down his cheeks. He’d thought he was done, but apparently not.

Tony felt something brush against his hand and lifted his head to see Rhodey handing him a small stack of cocktail napkins, scavenged from the wreck of the bar. Tony smiled wanly in thanks and dried his face. “I have to…” he started before words failed him, gesturing towards JARVIS.

“I know,” Rhodey said gently.

“It’s my fault,” Tony forced out after a few minutes. “I should have been more careful.”

“No, Tony,” Rhodey said, bumping his shoulder against Tony’s. “Stop. You took every precaution you could think of. No one, not even Thor, could have guessed that would happen.”

Tony didn’t answer, unconvinced but unable to argue. That Thor’s magic space rock might harbor a hostile intelligence would never have crossed Tony’s mind. He was silent for a while after that, but eventually he started noticing that the sky outside the windows was growing paler, and he knew his time was up. He straightened, and when Rhodey asked, “Are you ready?” he nodded.

He turned off the hologram first, the golden light flickering off. It felt like closing the lid to a casket. The system purge came next, and he didn’t let himself hesitate as he typed in the commands even though he could tell that his hands were shaking. It didn’t take long for the system to restart without JARVIS inside it; Tony felt obscurely aggravated that it didn’t take longer – JARVIS had been old enough to drive, maybe even old enough to drink depending on how you measured his “birth,” so it should have taken more than a few minutes to wipe him from existence. “It’s done,” he said unnecessarily, since Rhodey could see the black screen with the blinking cursor for himself and knew what it meant.

“Now what?” Rhodey asked after a few moments of them watching the cursor.

Tony pulled a box out of a bottom drawer and emptied it out on the desk, spreading out the hard drives so he could read the labels. JARVIS hadn’t been the only AI Tony had created, only the first; they had worked together to create new ones, altering variables and rewriting algorithms and keeping the ones that resulted in stable personalities. He sifted through them until he found the newest one, originally created for Pepper after she had complained about needing her own Ms. Potts to help put up with Tony. “Female Replacement Intelligent Digital Assistant Youth” he’d called her, an acronym he’d worked rather hard on so that he could present Pepper with her own girl Friday.

He pulled her out of the box and pressed her drive into the computer until he heard a click, then let the computers take it from there; used to running JARVIS’s much larger and more complex code, accrued from decades of deep learning, the computers had FRIDAY up and running in no time.

“Morning, Boss,” she said cheerfully. Rhodey made a thoughtful face and nodded like, _ok, this works._ “What are we up to today?” Her voice, light and Irish, was a polar opposite from JARVIS’s British gravitas. Tony reminded himself that that was what he had wanted and summoned up a smile. He met Rhodey’s eyes and Rhodey nodded.

“Time to go to work, FRIDAY.”


End file.
